Help us help you

When it comes to the HME industry, data can be hard to come by.

Almost all HME companies (on the provider side, anyway) are private now, so there's no more gleaning, say, revenue per employee for Apria Healthcare and using that as a benchmark (in context, of course) for your revenue per employee. This reminds me, we had a session at our HME News Business Summit a number of years back, during which Don Davis analyzed the financials of some of the national HME companies, which were still public at the time—let's just say you didn't need toothpicks to keep everyone's eyes open for that hour.

That's why in the past five years or so, there's been a big effort to fill in this void in a number of different ways. AAHomecare launched a data gathering initiative related to audits. The VGM Group launched an impact survey to collect data on the impact of competitive bidding on HME companies and their patients. The overarching goal of these surveys: using data to influence policy change.

But going back 12 years now, the Financial Benchmarking Survey conducted by HME News and Steven Richards and Associates has been consistently buzzing in the background, providing useful data to help owners drive their HME companies to succeed on a day-to-day basis.

Data points include:

• Revenue / revenue growth
• Revenue by payer / by employee / by payer type
• Profitability / profit as a percentage of revenues
• Gross profit / expenses / EBITDA
• DSO
• Fastest growing product lines
• Acquisition cost trends
• Expense benchmarks

It goes on and on. For a presentation that Rick Glass gives each year at the Summit, during which he analyzes the results of the survey, there are no fewer than 40 slides chockfull with data.

Each year, however, it gets harder and harder to draw a large enough sample to make the survey results useful to HME companies—and representative of the industry.

We know the survey is slightly time consuming. We struggle to balance making the survey easy to complete with making it meaningful—not to mention keeping the data points consistent from year to year, so there's a historical perspective. We now have a PDF of all the survey questions, so that you can prepare your answers in advance, and then hop online to plug and play.

But, ultimately, we need your help. Help us help you, and complete the survey today. The deadline is Thursday, July 13.